Extract directory from wget's stdout

Question

I am trying to wget a tarball from github.com and, without creating a temporary file, extract a subdirectory from it:

wget -qO- https://github.com/django-nonrel/django-nonrel/tarball/develop | tar xzf - django

It gives me an error saying:

tar: django: Not found in archive
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

Apparently I am doing something wrong.

Answer 1

Since the django directory itself is a subdirectory of the resulting gzip content, you'll need to use the --strip-components=1 option of GNU tar. Assuming you're using GNU tar. Then you need to tell tar that you're looking for a subdirectory called django.

wget -qO- https://github.com/django-nonrel/django-nonrel/tarball/develop | tar --strip-components=1 -zxf - \*/django

FWIW, I also had to use the --no-check-certificate option of wget.